This is a silly course of (punitive?) action. But it also highlights the silly extent to which this patent war has reached. Samsung was indeed egregious in its *slavish* copying. But trying to use legal means to stop them is proving hard. Negotiations appear to be the only way out of this mess.

Nope. The timing was driven by the expiring deal with Google. They had, I think, 6 more months left? Surely they couldn't introduce the new Maps in Jan 2013. And they sure weren't going to extend the deal on Google's terms. This was a calculated risk. But more and more, it strikes me that the Maps pseudo-mess was only one small piece of the Forstall puzzle. Cook wants team work. Forstall wanted to be a prima donna.

Agree, to an extent. But there are also many cases where it is a real advantage. I disagree. As mentioned, we hear stories of how Jobs nixed this or pushed that. I believe most of them to be roughly, if not entirely true. But these are complex products with myriad design decisions. Jobs did NOT make the final call in all cases. Some of them are in fact decided by a group of "equals" hashing out details. Say you are the software guy and I am the processor guy. Are...

First of all, if you have been reviewing "this stuff" for years, you should be able to drop citations without breaking a sweat. Second, your definitions apply to everyone because nobody is strictly one way or the other. They also happen to be the type of vague definitions one finds on the internet, rather than scientific definitions. The amateurish tactic of name-dropping is so ... amateurish. We won't be "going into it" because, frankly, you are a poseur and not...

Yes, you can fabricate things that would drive truly knowledgeable people crazy. But saying it is true does not make it so. I challenge you to cite peer-reviewed studies demonstrating that majority of left-brained folks find eye-candy painful and that majority of right-brained people are more stimulated by it. In fact, I challenge you to define what a right-brained person is, without looking it up. If you cannot do so within today (which should be doable since you...